[joonas]

While edge functions and durable objects are both excellent examples of technologies that could be built using wasmCloud, they are (assuming we’re talking about either a CDN provider like Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai or Cloud providers like AWS, Azure, GCP) not readily available in many environments.

An example brooksmtownsend linked to elsewhere in the thread is an industrial use case where one of the wasmCloud adopters is shipping a device running wasmCloud (and thus their Wasm components) locally within an industrial site: https://wasmcloud.com/blog/2024-10-22-webassembly-adoption-t...

So from a deployment perspective, not being tied to the public cloud/internet availability in general is a huge benefit.

But beyond deployment, due to the way wasmCloud is designed with the concept of capability providers and components, you are able to write providers that can integrate with any other existing protocols, services, software or hardware to make them available for your WebAssembly components to talk to.

In essence, you use WIT (think Protocol Buffers, but for WebAssembly) to describe the interface you would like your components to be able to call, and then you fulfill the interface from the providers and code generate the “guest” (or client-side) of the calling code for your WebAssembly components.

This means that you are not locked-in to the services and API's of your edge function provider and your function is portable to any cloud or edge.

[firtoz]

Thanks, this helps a lot to understand it, feels quite exciting indeed.